Mossad Man

...In 1948 he and his parents moved to Israel...

...this time I responded verb ally, saying that this was too short a time to allow people on the ground to accustom themselves to a condition that would resemble the relations between Belgium and the Netherlands...

...a society that prefers role models to heroes, weakness to strength, and guilt to pride in order to fashion the "incentives" that encourage us to become rationally controlled citizens...

...Of course, the Arab leader on most American minds today is the head ofal Qaeda, Osama bin Laden...

...As Halevy tells it, after a leisurely lunch, the negotiations began: The king turned to me and asked whether I thought that five years was reasonable...

...Joseph Shattan is the author of Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War...

...In 1995 he left the Mossad for an uneventful tour of duty in Brussels as Israel's ambassador to the Europe an Union, but was recalled to Is rael by prime minister Netanyahu in 1998 to lead the Mossad...

...totally unsensational overview of recent Middle East history...

...Tryingto follow Mansfield's sentences is like trying to keep your hood ornament on the white line during a snowstorm...

...Given this curious state of affairs, I would guess that Israeli leaders have ambivalent feelings about President Bush's Democracy Initiative...

...When Halevy asked how the Washington Declaration contradicted Peres's promises, "I received no reply, and was kept wondering, to this very day, what it was that the Palestinians had been promised on the most delicate of subjects, that of Jerusalem, that the Washington Declaration appeared to contradict...

...This is nothing compared to what I have to tell you...

...One day, Ambassador Halevy received an urgent summons to Jerusalem to deal with a major crisis...

...In the meantime, Halevy urges Americans to create a"fully-fledged security service...

...The irony of Rabin's career is that his name will always be associated with a Palestinian-Israeli agreement that he privately regarded as deeply fawed...

...First, his benign attitude toward Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War had gotten him into hot water with the Americans, who stopped supplying Jordan's armed forces...

...in return, Hussein would allow the six Mossad agents to return to Israel...

...In most countries, drafting a document of this importance would be the task of the Foreign Office...

...In his early twenties he was president of the National Union of Israeli Students, and participated in numerous international gatherings around the world...

...As soon as 1 heard about it I began churning out promotir real copy in my head: "From the 300 Spartans to the men of the Titanic...

...Of course, Israel and Jordan had enjoyed relatively friendly covert relations long before 1994, based on the fact that the two countries shared a host of common adversaries-including Syria, the PLO, and the Muslim Brotherhood...

...Manliness is conspicuously dramatic, not always controlled, and occasionally irrational because it is all about taking risks, taking charge, and taking credit, often in a loud, commanding voice...

...Second, Hussein was afraid that in the aftermath of the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO, the Palestinians would supplant Jordan as the principal guardians of Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem...

...He suggested that the Israelis release the jailed founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and hand him over to King Hussein, who would thus gain credit with his people for securing the beloved sheikh's freedom...

...Halevy obviously had a unique bond of friendship with the late King Hussein, but the political constellation in Jordan--a straightforward acceptance of Israel among the ruling elite, coupled with a vicious rejection of Israel among the masses--also exists, to one degree or another, in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, and Qatar...

...the chivaMc ideal displayed at West Point in 1861 when cadets fl'nm Union states presented arms as their Southern classmates marched off the field to the strai ns ~f'Dixie.'" %.1 :ndying admiration: Coriolanus and Custer...

...Now, of all the possible virtues, or parts of virtues, manliness seems most to illustrate virtue by not being either in one's interest (narrowly understood) (22" defined by principle...

...Today, Halew heads a foreign-policy think tank at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem...

...The two men met in Amman in the guest house of Crown Prince Hassan, the king's brother...

...MARTIN'S PRESS, 292 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by Joseph Shattan United States of America," Halevy has precious little to say about the Mossad's covert operations...

...we've always wanted to blow about Plato's presentation of thumos in The Republic...

...Manliness by Harvey C, Mansfield (Y~tF UNIVERSITY PRESS, 304 PAGES, $27.50) Reviewed by Florence King T IlE IIEFINITION OF SHEER JOY is the reaction of a conservative on learning that a book entitled Manliness has just been published...

...At a given moment, His Majesty said that it would be twenty-five and that was it...

...But if Halevy does not hesitate to offer Americans advice on howbest to protect themselves against their enemies, he is silent on other matters of great topical interest, such as Saddam's alleged possession of WMD, or the extent of the ties between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda...

...Rabin "was himself taken aback by the outcome, but was politically unable to extricate himself from the web that had been woven by the nonprofessionals who had championed and produced what Rabin himself would later come to describe as a piece of Swiss cheese, where the holes outnumber the actual morsels of cheese...

...Either way, Arafat clearly was not a credible peace partner for Israel...

...It reminds us of the manly confidence (Chapter D that remains aloof and does not seek to take charge of risky emergencies...

...the tragedy of Rabin's life is that he was cut down by an Israeli zealot before he was able to fill the Oslo Agreement's many holes...

...All this makes Halew's book a solid, informative, but (alas...

...Halevy believes that al Qaeda seeks to bring about "an Islamic empire that will encompass the entire planet...

...Netanyahu reluctantly agreed, and everything went as planned: King Hussein became a Palestinian hero, the Israelis were allowed to go home, and Jordan transferred Sheikh Yassin to Gaza, where he instructed Palestinian suicide bombers on the heavenly delights awaiting them until he himself was dispatched to the next world by an Israeli bomb in 2003...

...Also present was the head of the Royal Court, Aun Hassauna...

...That could wellbe one of the reasons for the success of any future attack on American territory...

...64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Efraim Halew sat at the right hand of power in Israel during one of the most fateflfl and significant periods in Middle East histo W, and if he does not reveal all that he knows, what he does choose to tell us about his own exploits, and about the organization he once headed, is enough to remind us that today, as in the past...

...After all, it is inconceivable that King Hussein would so readily have agreed to allow Israelis to cultivate Jordanian land if he had to answer for his decision to a genuinely representative Jordanian parliament...

...Still, Man in the Shadows is an important book...

...Efraim Halew was born in London in 1934...

...One of the most serious sticking points concerned a swath of land south of the Dead Sea that Israel had occupied as a result of the Six- Day War and that Jordan demanded back...

...62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Thus it came about that the Israeli foreign minister never learned the actual wording of the Washington declaration until President Clinton read it out during the White House ceremony...

...Nietzsche's nihilism, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Rousseau's philosophy of education as set forth in Emile, all couched in a prose style guaranteed to cure insomnia in ten minutes...

...Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's former military chief-of-staff, recently stated that Saddam did possess WMD, which he transferred to Syria on the eve of the war...

...It took three months before Israeli and Jordanian negotiators succeeded in translating the Washington Declaration into a formal peace treaty...

...JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...

...Since Halevy was at the helm of the Mossad in the run-up to the Second Gulf War, he is uniquely qualified to address these issues, and his failure to do so is disappointing...

...at's in a \Vbrd...

...Rabin had wanted to appoint Halevy ambassador to Jordan, but Peres blocked the appointment...

...Halevy joined the Mossad in 1961, served in several "senior postings," including Washington and Paris, and rose to become deputy chief in 1990...

...brains and courage are still the decisive forces of human history...

...In Halevy's view, Rabin was forced into the Oslo Agreement by his arch-rival (and Halevy's least favorite Israeli leader), Shimon Peres...

...I immediately realized that we could go no further and concentrated my effort on securing the twenty-five-year limit...

...Jordanian and Israeli negotiators finally agreed that while Jordan would regain sovereignty over the entire area, Israelis would temporarilybe allowed to cultivate the land...

...I F KING HUSSEIN WAS THE ARAB LEADER Halevy most admired, Yassir Arafat was the leader Halevy least understood...

...I shook my head from left to right, so he offered ten...

...that prototype of self-discipline, the Color Sergeant in Zulu...

...Mansfield's thesis is that manliness still exists whether we like it or not, and that most of us do not like it because it threatens the gender-neutral society we have so carefully constructed...

...He knew that Peres and his acolytes were pursuing covert negotiations in Norway with Arafat, but didn't think anything would come of the "Oslo track...

...What women REALLY want: "I could not love thee...

...How did Rabin, a prudent strategic thinker "known to be a stickler when it came to Israel's security interests," ever come to embrace the likes of Arafat...

...virtu in Machiavelli ("To be altogether bad you have to be good at being bad, thus good...

...The p roblem was that Israel had established thriving villages in that area, and that uprooting those villages would be traumatic...

...Thus did we secure a quarter of a century of continued exploitation of the land in the south together with the use of the water obtained from the wells in exchange for additional water that Israel would allot to Jordan in the north...

...But since the majority of Jordanians (some estimates run as high as 80 percent) are Palestinian in origin, and since their feelings toward Israel are anything but cordial, it seemed highly unlikely that Hussein would ever take the plunge and sign a formal peace treaty with Israel...

...Halevy was never able to decide whether Arafat actually believed his own falsehoods--in which case he was seriously divorced from reality-or whether he was simply a cynical, compulsive liar...

...Once again, Rabin dispatched Halevy to Jordan to work out an arrangement with King Hussein...

...And yet, in the 1993 Oslo Agreement Prime Minister Rabin had accepted Arafat as Israel's partne r in the search for peace...

...By this time Aun Hassauna was beginningto show signs of growing agitation and as I indicated that we had not yet reached the right number, His Majesty said, "Twenty-five," whereupon Hassauna veritably exploded, urging His Majesty to go back rather than forward...

...In the course of his long career in the Mossad, Halevy developed an extraordinarily close personal relationship with King Hussein of Jordan (how this came about is not revealed) and some of the most interesting vignettes in Man in the Shadows deal with Halevy's role first in initiating, and then in salvaging, the IsraeliJordanian peace treaty of 1994...

...Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, looked to H alevy to come up with a solution--and Halevy did not disappoint...

...STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope's Corner, l qC)l to 2002 6~atiomff Review Press...

...A Mossad hit team operating in Jordan had tried to assassinate a prominent leader of the terrorist organization Hamas, but the attack failed, two of the six Mossad agents were captured by Jordanian authorities and the remaining four had taken shelter in the Israeli embassy in Amman...

...But how long would this temporary arrangement last...

...Like President Bush, Halevy believes that there is only one way to deal with al Qaeda: "Given the character and methods employed by the Islamic terrorists, only their destruction will produce the ultimate solution...

...To block the Palestinians and appease the Americans, King Hussein decided to bite the bullet and make peace with Israel...

...To achieve its goal, al Qaeda is fullyprepared to use weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations, and it is the proliferation of these weapons throughout the Middle East, and the growing risk that al Qaeda will obtain some of them, that makes the current crisis--Halevy calls it World War I I I - s o dangerous...

...These are just some lump-in-the-throat examples of manliness that I expected to find in this book, but Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard professor of government, delivers nothing but a lump, the fatal kind that metastasizes whenever the faculty lounge and the University Press join hands and lock jaws...

...warfare as minuet: the polished courtesies observed by gentlemen officers Robert Mitchum and Curt 3urgens in The Enemy Below...

...Though he served in Israel's formidable intelligence agency, the Mossad, for 40 years, headed that organization for four-and-a-half years, and-among other high honors--received the CIA's Director's Award, "in recognition of his unswerving commitment and dedication to the relationship between Israel and the Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis With a Man Who Led the Mossad by Efraim I-lalevy (ST...

...The rationally controlled society, says Mansfield, "fears courage more than fear," and so does everything it can to "encourage and compel behavior conspicuously lacking in drama...

...Halevy acknowledges that many Americans would oppose, on libertarian grounds, the creation of the kind of agency he advocates, but he is adamant: "As long as there is no security service in the United States, there shall remain a yawning gap in the defenses of that great nation...

...the mutual respect that springs up between the hunted white man and his M'rican pursuers when he a4ns the test of manliness in The Naked Prey...

...In 2002 he was asked by Prime Minister Sharon to head up Israel's National Security Council, but he left after a year's service, deeply disturbed by Sharon's decision to endorse the so-called "Road Map"--a plan for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, sponsored by the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations, that Halevy fears will culminate in an unfavorable settlement being imposed on Israel...

...By 1994, however, two things had happened to alter the king's calculus...

...E FRAIM HALEVY WAS the intermediary between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein in their initial efforts to define the broad contours of a peace treaty...

...Confronted by this 800-pound gorilla, today's Sensitive Man murmurs, "This rationally controlled society ain't big enough for both of us," and Americans, clutching their incentives, rush to agree with him...

...dear, so nmeh, loved I not h o n o t l r lnoFe.'" Next, 1 mentally wrote the.jacket copy...

...Other prominent Israelis have not been so reticent...

...When Clinton was done, Peres turned to Halevy and informed him that the declaration was "a very big mistake," because it contradicted promises that Peres had made to PLO leader Yassir Arafat regarding Jerusalem...

...When Halevy told his Arab interlocutors about Arafat's lies, their invariable response was, "Are you telling me about Arafat's lying and prevarications...

...As Halevy explains, "Whereas at the senior and top levels of government in the Arab world there has been a steadily growing acceptance of Israel as a reality-and, by some, even as a vital partner in the fight against violence and hate--these very same regimes have nurtured and in some cases even encouraged popular activities JUNE 2OO6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 BOOKS IN REVIEW that have run contrary to their so-called strategic policies and interests...

...A furious King Hussein was demanding that Israel hand the four agents over to Jordan, and had ordered a crack Jordanian military unit to storm the embassy if his demand was refused...

...Instead of pumping us up, he tells us everything Florence King ~ books im'lude Confessions of a Failed Southern t,ady, The Florence King Reader, and, most recenth...

...As Halevy tells it, when Rabin came into office he was focused on achieving a peace agreement with Syria, not the PLO...

...To wit: Epictetus displays Stoicism in its pure form, unadapted to politics (as distinct from Cicero's adaptation), hence completely irresponsible: don't get involved is the lesson...

...Ours is a society in which one slip of a pronoun can rouse suspicions of sexism...

...Canceling all that subjugation requires overcoming the relevant powers of nature, or, in sum (and for the sake of being sure), deny nature...

...Indeed, Halevy was the person who actually drafted the agreement on common principles that was unveiled in a ceremonyon the White House lawn in July 1994, and came to be known as the Washington Declaration...

...The King went up to fifteen and as I shook my head once again he said twenty...

...Halevy's final contribution to Israeli-Jordanian relations came after he had retired from the Mossad and became ambassador to the EU...

...Of course, Peres had not bothered to inform Rabin of these promises...

...Instead, his book is filled with sharply drawn portraits of Arab and Israeli leaders, absorbing accounts of hitherto undisclosed diplomatic missions in which Halevy played a leading role, and astute observations on the war on terror...

...He thinks the FBI is not up to the job, since its principal task is to prosecute crimes after they are committed, while the main job of a security service is to prevent a terrorist act from occurring in the first place...

...On the one hand, they must surely welcome anyAmerican action that encourages Arab governments to confront their dire social problems directly, instead of blaming all their ills on "Zionist conspiracies...

...He provides numerous examples of the wild, outrageously crude lies that Arafat peddled both in his public pronouncements and in private meetings with heads of state--such as telling President Clinton, during the Camp David peace talks, that Jews had no connection to Jerusalem, or informing European leaders that Mossad agents, rather than Palestinian terrorists, had murdered a prominent Israeli cabinet minister...

...On the other hand, they probab]yfear that popular inroads into the prerogatives of relatively friendly Arab leaders ~ l l only serve to unwind the fragile web of understandings that currently exists between Israel and some of her Arab neighbors...

...in Israel, however, Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were bitter rivals, so naturally Rabin ordered Halevy to keep Peres totally in the dark about the Jordanian negotiations...

...Forgotten manliness: the nameless English soldier who fashioned a cross for Joan of Arc from the wood of her pyre...

...Such an attack, of course, might well scuttle the Israeli-JordanJan peace treaty...

...women and akuron in Aristotle's Politics...